Months after seeing it, my most vivid memory of Carlos Saura's latest
dance picture is not, surprisingly enough, of legs thrusting or pelvises
swiveling or profiles conjoined. It's not visual at all, in fact, but
aural: what haunts me is a recurring, vaguely menacing theme composed by
the great Lalo Schifrin (best known, I suppose, for his rousing theme for
TV's Mission: Impossible, though he's also composed scores for
everything from The President's Analyst to Doctor Detroit)
-- a piece of music so insidiously thrilling that it was sometimes almost
enough to convince me that the movie itself was thrilling, too. And
perhaps it is, to those for whom the tango alone is entertainment enough
(though I can't imagine that even dance aficionados are capable of
suppressing a snort at the ludicrous, laughably grandiose death-camp
number -- and no, I am not inventing that); anybody seeking more
than just flamboyant footwork, on the other hand, must contend with a
tired self-referential plot about the making of the very film we're
currently trying to enjoy, only trouble being that we can't enjoy it
because we're constantly being reminded that we're watching a movie -- the
very same movie, in fact, that... (Etc.) Saura's previous effort, 1997's
Flamenco (he's moving through Latin
dance forms the way Branagh's moving through the Shakespeare canon), was
admirably pure, dispensing entirely with narrative and character to simply
showcase one exhilarating performance after another; I eventually got a
bit bored, it's true, having a limited tolerance for dancing in which the
hoofers don't also sing Porter or Gershwin tunes, but I can easily see how
others might enjoy such uncomplicated virtuosity for hours on end.
Waiting out the downtime between numbers in the company of a
creatively-blocked film director who's falling in love with a lovely young
ingénue who's unfortunately the moll of the very gangster who's
coincidentally financing the director's work, on the other hand, has gotta
be a bit of a chore even for the truly choreography-obsessed.